Health Notes: Daisy's sweet 'n' Lowe no-sugar cookbook

Model Daisy Lowe has become the latest celebrity to shun sugar – and has written cookbook to share her tips on living without it.

Daisy, the daughter of fashion designer Pearl Lowe and Bush rocker Gavin Rossdale, had a party-girl lifestyle until undergoing an operation in 2010 to fix a wrongly shaped tube connecting her kidney and bladder.

The 25-year-old, right, took a year off from modelling to recover and has made good health her priority.

‘I find that by eating better and not depriving myself I sleep better and get sick less often,’ says Daisy, known for being curvy as models go.

‘Instead of snacking on Haribo, I’ll have a slice of raw chocolate and avocado tart – it’s not hard to find the ingredients to use.

‘My book, Sweetness And Light, has recipes that will satisfy a sweet tooth but are free from gluten, dairy and refined sugar.

'Some are raw and some are vegan. I created a collection of recipes that ensure you can enjoy sweet things without harming your body.’

Gossip is a tool of aggression
and can be bad for health and wellbeing, new research suggests.

Psychologists found that women are more likely than men to use gossip in
an aggressive, competitive manner, and that this can lead to victims
suffering stress, depression and other mental-health problems.

‘On
the darker side, gossip offers a means of manipulating reputations by
passing on negative information about competitors as well as a means of
detecting betrayal by others,’ says Dr Francis McAndrew, who led the
study at Knox College in the US.

‘Gossip is the weapon of choice in the
female arsenal.’

According
to the report in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior, the goal
of gossip is often to exclude competitors from a social group and damage
their ability to maintain a reliable social network of their own. It
can be seen in girls as young as six.

Gossip can also be a part of workplace bullying by women – and most often against another woman.

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Vitamin C ‘turns back time’

Drinking liquid Vitamin C can take years off your appearance, claims new research.

Half the people in a clinical study said their skin looked younger after taking it three times a day for four weeks.

The ‘fruit vitamin’ is important in creating the protein collagen, which gives skin its elasticity, and Gwyneth Paltrow is a fan.

‘Formation of free oxygen radicals is widely accepted as a pivotal mechanism leading to skin ageing and Vitamin C is an important part of the body’s anti-oxidative defence mechanism,’ says dermatologist Sanjay Rajpara.

In the clinical trial, 60 people aged 31-65 took liquid Vitamin C Altrient C. Some 43 per cent said they looked younger, 33 per cent said skin looked more nourished and another 33 per cent said skin was firmer.

Let it flow: A lycopene pill contains as much of the plant-compound as more than 2lb of tomatoe

Tomato pill boosts the heart

Taking a daily lycopene pill – containing as much of the plant-compound as more than 2lb of tomatoes – can increase blood vessel flow by 50 per cent in heart attack survivors, says research.

The benefits of lycopene, as reported by The Mail on Sunday earlier this year, were confirmed by the study at Cambridge University.

Heart-attack victims took the £1 pill once a day for two months, after which it was found that blood vessels were widened and cells lining the vessels were almost as good as those of healthy people. Lycopene gives tomatoes their colour and could be why the

Mediterranean diet is so healthy, as it is particularly potent combined with olive oil.

Supporting our team... with groin strain shorts!

A ne w pair of support shorts could help sportsmen suffering from groin injury – including England football captain Steven Gerrard – who had to skip some of the team’s training session on Monday due to the condition.

The shorts are the invention of world-renowned groin injury specialist Mr Jerry Gilmore, whose pioneering work in treating the condition since the 1980s has led to its renaming as Gilmore’s Groin.

Groin strain is characterised by damage to muscle tissue and is most commonly found in footballers. ‘The groin and surrounding areas are vulnerable to injury from overstretching, running, twisting and excessive kicking,’ says Mr Gilmore. ‘It is overwhelmingly an injury seen in males who play sport.’

Designed to be worn while playing sport, the Gilmore Support Shorts, above (£99, PhysioRoom. com) are made of a stretchy material called Fleoprene which offers high levels of support and stability to the affected area.